Heavy-duty YouTube star

Stephen Cox and his service truck have a YouTube following of 100,000 subscribers.Photo: Rachel Cox

Most mobile heavy-duty mechanics work long hours and spend their lives toiling in obscurity.

Stephen Cox works a couple of days a week making equipment repair videos and posting them on a YouTube where they’re seen by millions of people.

Cox, a resident of Stephenville, Texas, just outside Fort Worth, posted his first YouTube video in 2015 as a way of advertising the service truck business he’d just started, Texas Shale Resolution (TSR).

“It wasn’t anything like the ones I do now, it was more just letting people know about my company,” says Cox, who has been married for 15 years and has two boys, ages 7 and 9.

“I’d just been fired from a job and I was starting out on my own.”

A couple of months later, Cox was surfing for advice on a small welding job and came upon a “how-to” channel run by a welder who lives in the same part of East Texas.

“I saw his video and actually recognized the road as being near my place,” he says. “I thought, ‘If this guy’s in the area maybe I can just get him to weld it up.’ I called him up around nine at night and he said, ‘Come on over.’”

Cox learned that the welder, who calls himself ChuckE2009, had about 120,000 subscribers and was making $10,000 to $12,000 a month in YouTube ad revenues.

“I had no idea you could make that kind of money. That’s when I said ‘I’m gonna try this YouTube thing,’” he says.

Entertainment value

Friendly and engaging on camera, Cox focused on adding entertainment value to his posts, something he found lacking in most Internet do-it-yourself videos.

“A lot of the videos you see online are pretty dry. They have excellent information and everything but they’re not that entertaining to watch,” says Cox who does most of the filming and editing himself.

“I definitely try to get a personal view and a personal touch and make it as interesting as possible.”

YouTube revenues were slow to materialize at first so Cox contracted out his services full-time to a heavy equipment repair job with a land-clearing company in San Antonio, but kept on posting videos.

“I was making pretty good money but it was like 70 or 80 hours a week,” Cox recalls. “I kept doing the YouTube channel and after awhile it started making … enough where I could quit that job.”

In 2016, he bought a 1999 F-450 crane truck (Maintainer body, 7.3-liter Power Stroke engine with a manual six-speed transmission, hydraulic compressor, and transmission-mounted PTO) a vehicle that’s featured in many of his videos.

He’s since replaced that with a V10, gasoline-powered Ford F-350 with four-wheel drive and a Knapheide body. A former BNSF railway service vehicle, the F-350 originally had steel wheels that were extended and retracted by a hydraulic power unit that is still mounted to the truck. Cox added a gas-powered Ingersoll Rand to the bed and separated the compressor from its power unit to minimize the height.

The diversity of tricky, quirky and obscure tasks he takes on in his videos leave no doubt that Cox is a versatile mechanic with a laser-sharp sense for troubleshooting and problem-solving.

Among the topics he’s covered so far: changing the head gasket on an antique bulldozer; replacing the water pump and alternator on a Ford 1710 tractor; rebuilding the hydraulic cylinder on a Caterpillar 623F Scraper; and using a machine shop software program to mail order a custom bracket for his drill press.

While his newer episodes still have technical content, they’re often more character-driven, at times taking on the feel of a Texas country boy reality show.

He’ll fix the starter on a 74-foot homemade steel boat at his buddy Doug’s place, head down to the Old Mill Pond Agricultural Museum in nearby Lindale to restore a vintage tractor or pull his neighbour’s F-250 out of a mud bog.

Video of Super Glue trick has racked up 13 million views and counting.YouTube screen capture

Cox’s ability to both explain and entertain led to his first “viral video” — The Super Glue Trick the Cops Don’t Want You to Know About — in which he demonstrates how super glue turns into a rock-hard, sandable filler when it’s dusted with baking soda.

It’s an old trick used by mechanics and woodworkers for decades. But Cox’s take includes an amusing story about some prison guards who found a stash of baking soda in his friend’s truck when they were headed to play softball against a team of inmates at the local jail.

“I didn’t specifically say in the title what the cops don’t want you to know, but I was alluding to the fact that if the cops find the baking soda they’re gonna think it’s coke or something,” he says.

The Super Glue video spread like wildfire.

“On the third day it went from 300 views to like 6,000 views. Then it went to 15,000 then 30,000 and I was getting a bunch of subscribers and then within 30 days it had 1.5 million views,” he recalls.

“I went from making $300 a month to $8,000 a month off YouTube. In a couple of months I went from 11,000 to about 50,000 subscribers and it just launched a whole new career.”

Several of his later videos contain the phrase “that the cops don’t want you to know about” in the title, as a way of inviting clicks.

“It’s become kind of an inside joke.” he says. “With YouTube your title and your thumbnail will get you more views and traffic and subscribers than anything else.”

Cox has an ongoing collaboration with Justin Mairot, his good friend and curator of the Old Mill Pond museum. Mairot has limited budget and a collection of antique machinery in dire need of restoration, including motors made by storied American companies like Sandwich, Galloway and New Way.

It’s a symbiotic relationship. Cox donates his time and skills to bring the rusted out relics back to life. He gets a cool video for his site, while Mairot gets free publicity for his cash-strapped operation.

Technical credibility key

While Cox’s on-camera presentation and creativity play a part in his success, those assets would mean nothing without technical credibility, Mairot says.

“He just figures things out so quickly. He goes through the process and quickly comes to a decision and he’s almost always right,” Mairot says. “People want a guy who knows what he’s talking about. Guys like us have pretty good bullshit meters.”

There’s more than a bit of shade tree mechanic in Cox’s background. Growing up in East Texas, his family didn’t have much money. So whenever something broke down, his father would fix it himself.

Cox, who recently turned 36, learned the basics of heavy-duty mechanics by watching his dad. In his 20s, he studied automotive and diesel technology at Universal Technical Institute in Houston, but got expelled for cutting too many classes.

He says it’s just not in his nature to show up at the same place and do the same thing every day.

“I’ve had a lot of jobs and what I tell people is, ‘I just make a terrible employee,’” Cox says. “I’d rather be working for myself and going out in the middle of the night to rescue a stranded RV or whatever.”

Cox may have found a specific niche with his site’s focus on heavy-duty diesel and automotive repair, but he’s also part of a thriving community of YouTube handymen covering every kind of industrial instruction, assembly, repair and maintenance imaginable.

Festival features handy YouTubers

In fact, Mairot is organizing a festival of skilled manufacturing and maintenance YouTubers that will be held in Lindale on Nov. 3.

Several of the attendees at the festival — for example all-purpose handy man Jimmy Diresta, U.K. blacksmith Alec Steele, and the gadget and accessory repair site AvE — have a million or more subscribers.

It’s an audience that has immense value to advertisers. Even Cox with his meagre 100,000 followers receives frequent offers from companies asking him to endorse their products. He invariably turns them down and will only do videos about equipment and tools that he actually uses.

These days, Cox keeps the number of service truck jobs he does to a minimum, taking on just enough to keep his skills sharp and gather material for his videos, which now generate about 90 percent of his income.

To date, his posts have generated more than 26 million views, more than enough incentive to keep on making videos and trying to grow his audience.

“I know people out there with three quarters of a million subscribers and they’re making $60,000 or $70,000 a month,” he says. “The way it’s going, I’ll be surprised if I don’t have a million subscribers in the next 10 years.”